American Scientist

TRUE COLOR: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color—from Azure to Zinc Pink. Kory Stamper. 320 pp. Knopf, 2026. $32.

Kory Stamper’s True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color—from Azure to Zinc Pink gives a delightfully detailed view of how the lexicographers behind the 1961 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary grappled with the impossible: how to define the words of the English language that describe color. Stamper calls this task a “quest,” and rightly so. The creation of these dictionary entries was a major benchmark in a search for accurate, succinct, and principled ways to use language that had been going on for more than a century.

Dictionary writers face an unenviable and exacting task. Their job is to use language to write concise but exhaustive definitions of words and their many subsenses. Dictionaries are founded on the premise that it is possible to state what words mean in terms of other words, delineating a standard set of discrete meanings that all who speak the language agree on. But people don’t agree on what words mean, and they don’t all use words in the same way—and so dictionaries have to simultaneously describe usage (people call this color “teal”) and prescribe meaning (this color is “celadon,” not “teal”).

There are three main threads in True Color: Stamper’s explanations and explorations of how dictionary authors write definitions; the history of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary; and the contributions to that seminal book by Isaac Hahn Godlove (a scientist hired by Merriam-Webster to help with dictionary revisions) and Emma Margaret Godlove (who was employed as a stenographer but who was really the driving force behind many of the eventual printed definitions).

Color is often defined with respect to something else—for example, something that prototypically has a particular hue, such as teal or lapis lazuli. A nice example is how words meaning “ashes” end up meaning either “black” or “white” in some Indigenous Australian languages: black if you have charcoal in mind, white if it’s cold ashes. Stamper writes about how these issues led to Webster’s color definitions fluctuating for many years before publication, such as trying to define terms scientifically by dye recipes, math, or physics, which are more precise approaches but less informative than “goldenrod.” Gold standard definitions in terms of spectrography don’t capture what color words mean, because the experience of color is subjective and the words we use to describe colors are bound up with much more than the reference points in a color atlas.

The domain of color makes it clear just how difficult it is to define words by using other words. How does it help someone to understand meaning to define “begonia” as “stronger than average coral,” or “buttercup” as “a variable color averaging a vivid yellow that is redder and deeper than dandelion (see dandelion 3b) or goldenrod (see goldenrod 2a)”? This approach gives a sense, perhaps, but we don’t always need color terms to express color. I read this book on a flight heading west out of New York at sunset, on a cloudy, slightly smoky evening where the color of the sky could only be described as apocalyptic. We can express hues with color words and still be none the wiser, or we can call our feelings “blue” or “see red,” and use these terms where color is irrelevant.

True Color was both more specific and more general than I expected. Ironically, this concern is often what students say about introductory linguistics classes, so I thoroughly enjoyed a dose of my own medicine. The book is broad in the sense that there is a lot of information about dye manufacturing during World War I, the personalities of early 20th-century lexicographers, and arguments over what constitutes meaning. The book’s pages detail how language is everywhere, intertwined with everything from philosophy to paint mixing. But it is narrower in its approach to language and color itself. True Color isn’t really a book about color words in general; it’s about Merriam-Webster’s definitions of color.

Stamper also introduces readers to the concept of the “triangle of meaning,” attributed here to linguists Charles Ogden and Ivor Richards, but which actually goes back in various forms to Aristotle. It is the idea that meaning has three parts: the word, its referent in the world, and the “concept” that the word evokes. Words don’t just mean the things they refer to in the world, because we can understand words that don’t refer to real things, or words may refer to real things, even if we don’t have firsthand knowledge of said things (you have a meaning of “platypus” even if you’ve never seen one). To this list, I usually add that we need a grammatical and a social context to map concepts to referents and words. Otherwise, we don’t have a way of describing the difference between “spew” and “throw up” (same concept, same sticky referent, different tone).

The meaning triangle helps explain why words are so difficult to define. There’s a slippery slope between the meanings of words and the context that we need to know in order to understand them fully. For example, pink and blue are “gendered” colors in North America, to the extent that if you see a baby in a pink onesie you’ll probably assume the baby is a girl. Is that part of the referent (that is, the actual pink color)? No. It’s arbitrary, and 100 years ago “pink” had no such connotations. Is it part of the concept of pink? Probably so, at this point. But should that go in a dictionary? That’s where I’m glad I don’t have to make these decisions.

The snapshot of colors that Stamper provides in True Color tells an engaging history: of meaning, of dictionary crafting, and of the unique imprint left by those whose task it was to bring the language of color into this specific edition of Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. Thousands of color words later, did Stamper and her lexicographer predecessors succeed in their quests? Maybe so, at least until the next batch of colors need defining.